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Explain to them what a hopefully RESTful Web Service is.
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Robby PondMar 17 '11 at 1:38

3

Nothing wrong with that. This sounds like an implementation detail with not much business need behind it. As long as it is only your colleagues (or random people on the Internet) complaining, don't worry. Ask them what exactly they could do with SOAP that they cannot already do in a slightly different fashion with what you have now. If customers demand SOAP (and are willing to pay for that), then you can think about it again.
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ThiloMar 17 '11 at 1:39

When they say they want SOAP, do they mention WHICH SOAP features they're really after? When I'm doing Java web services, and .Net clients, I personally prefer SOAP so that VS can generate a bunch of .NET classes that'll automagically handle all the network stuff, XML parsing, and object mapping, which while isn't hard, is a PITA. That addresses the lazy issues. If there are OTHER reasons, being able to fall back to an SMTP or other transport layer, which yes, I have actually done with SOAP. Do they have an older service bus that doesn't support REST? Is your interface actually REST? (ok, I said that earlier ). There are a lot of things in SOAP that are addressed in REST with the old YAGNI argument, which is usually true, but not always.